Observations on economics, the academy, the wider world, and things that run on rails.

16.6.15

THE QUINTESSENCE OF SELF-DESPISING MULTICULTURALISM.

Steven Singer, "I am Racist and (If You’re White) You Probably Are, Too." It's the usual theorrhea, complete with the usual marginalized-people-can-be-prejudiced-if-not-downright-jerks, but "Racism is hate plus power." Pontificators like to throw the term "power" around a lot. I don't know where this particular specimen of self-despising multiculturalist is coming from, but for my purposes, I like the definition of power being the ability to compel someone else to do what you want. (That's not the same thing as the use of force, Adam Smith's famous "give me that which you have, and you can have this that you want" is mutually beneficial compulsion.) But that kind of pleading becomes silly when it's used by people with the authority to send dissenters to diversity training or call out "micro-aggression" or simply rule some arguments out of bounds as presumptively racist.

The hilarity ensues further on, when Mr Singer visits the sins of the ancestors onto the n-th generation. "And when you benefit from a system, you’re part of it." That, dear reader, is the fatal flaw in constructivist arguments of the Perpetually Aggrieved. A system is a historically contingent, emergent, collection of institutions and traditions that well might be evolutionary stable. To repeat: "[W]hen practitioners of one strategy interact with practitioners of another, the strategy that confers advantages on adopters might look like oppression to defenders of the losing strategy."

To use Mr Singer's words, but in a different context, "Understanding will come – eventually."